No Man's Sky is a highly anticipated upcoming game for PS4, originally announced by developer and publisher Hello Games in 2013. But when is No Man's Sky coming out? And will it ever be available on Xbox One?

Hello Games first announced No Man's Sky at VGX 2013, releasing a trailer for the game at the same time. It was then highlighted by Sony during its press event at E3 in June this year, though we've still yet to hear an official release date for the game.

It's expected that No Man's Sky will arrive in 2015.

UK-based Hello Games is the studio also behind the Joe Danger series.

E3 2014 gave us lots of insight into what No Man's Sky is going to be like to play when it arrives on our consoles. It went down a treat with the critics, too, winning "Best Original Game" and "Best Independent Game" during the event, in addition to its "Special Commendation for Innovation" award.

So what's No Man's Sky about? It's a science-fiction game that lets players explore and survive in an infinite procedurally generated universe. That means that planets and solar systems will be built as you play, and each will be different to the next.

"Whether a distant mountain or a planet hanging low on the horizon, you can go there. You can fly seamlessly from the surface of a planet to another, and every star in the sky has a sun that you can visit," reads the No Man's Sky website.

There are many planets within No Man's Sky, each of which has a different landscape and different inhabitants. There are ancient artifacts to find and resources to collect and trade for new ships, suits and equipment to help you explore further.

"Choose whether to share your discoveries with other players," the website reads. "They're exploring the same vast universe in parallel; perhaps you'll make your make on their worlds as well as your own."

"Games are incredibly bad at making the rare feel rare," says Murray. "Call of Duty is so worried about you not seeing an explosion every 15 seconds, that there's never a quiet moment, there's never a buildup. We've lost that ability to have even a feeling of 'am I going the right way' that we're quite used to from real life."

"No Man's Sky" spurns the conventional structures of pre-written narratives, set-piece action sequences, and discrete levels. There are no quests in this game. You don't go planet-hopping to find a damsel or a merchant in distress and then fetch them three healing salves and four wolf pelts of varying colors. In fact, at the outset, you can't hop very far at all.

Each player is handed only the bare necessities for survival, dropped onto a planet on the rim of a galaxy, and left to his or her own devices. A basic life pod will putter you up to the nearest space station where you can begin to figure out how to get such devices, upgrade them, and do something useful or interesting with your life. Most people will start by either mining resources or trying their luck as a bounty hunter or freight security guard. What career paths lie beyond those basic professions is part of the exploration you'll have to do.

A single universe will be shared by all players of "No Man's Sky," though they'll be so distant from one another that coming across some other player-controlled spaceship will feel like a truly noteworthy event. As Murray explains, "people underestimate how vast our (in-game) universe is. If we were lucky enough to have a million players and started them all on one planet, they would still be really far apart."

The developers have set themselves a 90-10 rule. 90 percent of all the planets will not be habitable and won't have any life on them. Of the 10 percent that do, 90 percent of that life will be primitive and boring. The tiny fraction of garden worlds with more evolved life forms on them will thus be almost as rare in the game universe as they ought to be in the real one. This scarcity is part of the delicate balance that Hello Games is trying to strike between its idealistic commitment to the science of sci-fi and the inherent need to keep players entertained.

Ultimately, whether acting as a peaceful trader or a marauding raider, every explorer begins to get drawn in to the center of the universe. Riskier and more lucrative opportunities await travelers of all creeds. Effective cooperation, says Murray, will then be important to achieving each individual's goals. "The reality is we don't know what people will do - will they create spokes of a wheel where they cooperate to try and get to the center, or will it be totally chaotic and everyone will go off in different directions?"

Murray leaves us with the tantalizing notion that  "we don't actually know everything that's out there in this universe we are creating."

There are three trailers for No Man's Sky so far, all of which you can watch below to give you a better idea of what to expect from the game.